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You're at the
website of Paris-based scholar, teacher and IRE
award-winning investigative author Mark Lee
Hunter. It's a good place to download "Story-Based Inquiry", the
free ground-breaking manual by me and
colleagues in the Global Investigative
Journalism Network.

"I am impressed
by Story-Based Inquiry. I was prepared to
see it as one more book on investigative
reporting by someone whose time might be
better spent doing it. Instead I found it
insightful and logical. Plus it's
available online for free instead of just in
overpriced textbook fashion, meaning my
students might actually read it. I've
already used some material on making and
testing hypotheses in my Investigative
Reporting class and will soon be using
sections on writing in a news writing class.
I learned a few things and even things I
already knew are well explained and
illustrated here."Rosemary Armao, former director of
Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., Assis.
Prof. of Journalism at SUNY Albany

"I
absolutely recommend the use of 'Story-Based
Inquiry' in class. I tested it this autumn
at the Artevelde University College and I
clearly could see
students produced better research projects."Marleen
Teughels
Co-founder, Investigative Research Network
Europe (IRENE)

"One of the foremost investigative media
trainers in the world"VVOJ (Vereninging van Onderzoeksjournalisten)

The Digital Future of
Investigative Reporting
The Internet has bled the news industry, but
investigative reporting is thriving, and not by
coincidence. A documented essay for the Open
Society Foundation on how investigative reporting
will survive the crisis of news.

The Success and
Failure of Nicolas Sarkozy
France's president is creating an unprecedented
crisis in the postwar era: a possible victory of the
extreme right in the next presidential
elections. This article, first published in
(and linked to) Opendemocracy.net, renews my
coverage of the extreme right, suspended for the
past decade.

What Palin must have
known
After a shooter attacked Congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords, wounding her and killing several others,
Sarah Palin said it had nothing to do with her
"target" poster of Democrats. I made the link
between her team and the infamous Nuremberg Files,
which called for the assassination of pro-abortion
physicians... and still does.

If
Assange
is
a
Spy, so am IWhen the noise that the US government wanted
to prosecute the founder of Wikileaks got out, the
Global Investigative Journalism Network came to his
defense. I helped launch that initiative, and I
wrote the attached piece (from Opendemocracy.net) to
say why.

Why
Investigative Journalism is Coming Back:UNESCO asked me
to write about Freedom of Expression and
investigative reporting for World Press Freedom
Day 2010. The paradox is that while the news
industry declines, demand for deep news is going
up. The question is, how will journalists
profit from those trends? Click here.

The
Power of User Forums:My colleague
David Soberman and I wondered if user reviews
of durable consumer goods could impact their
prices on eBay. The short answer is
yes. In this INSEAD Working Paper
(forthcoming in Corporate Reputation Review)
we call this effect "The Equalizer", because
it enables small companies that make
high-quality goods to compete with much
bigger, richer firms. We include an
analysis of how folks on forums achieve this
effect, and what firms can do to benefit from
it. Click
here for the paper.

Why the crisis of business is only
beginning: What does the
financial crisis have in common with
Watergate? A long tail that will change the
dreams of generations to come. First
published on Opendemocracy.net, a terrific source
of ideas and debate and a great example of
Creative Commons publishing. Click
here.

The
Quantitative Revolution and the Crisis:"Quants" -- the
people who make quantitative models of how
financial markets and products perform -- have
been under close scrutiny for their role in the
crisis of 2008. In a conference at
Columbia University in December 2009, leading
academics and market practitioners got together
to analyse the promise and danger of those
models. By reading between their lines, my
conference report found some hidden risks; click
here.

Features and
Investigations (BTW: Some
of these stories are used as examples in
"Story-Based Inquiry", and if you use the
manual to teach, feel free to use them as
advance reading.)

My
Nights with Godard: One day someone called up claiming
to be the New Wave auteur. The next thing I
knew, I was in a movie. This account focuses
on the methods of the master.

IRE AWARD
WINNER!How
France's Pols Pocketed $45MTen years
ago, French politicians sought escape from the
financial scandals that hammered them by reforming
the salary scale for elected officials. But
the solution created another scandal waiting to be
exposed -- which is what my team from the
Insititut Français de Presse did in Le Figaro.

Portrait of a Killing: A True
Story of Power, Art and CrimeShe owned
a heritage of Old Masters paintings, and a lot of
people -- including the ones who ran the Louvre --
wanted a piece of it. For the first time in
English, a true crime novella drawn from a
nonfiction novel that drew international rave
reviews on its French release.

The
Shot Heard 'Round Le MondeFrance's
newspaper
of
record
runs
billboards
saying,
"The
price
of your freedom is ours." But a new book
claims Le Monde has gone bad to the bone.
To see what the fuss is about, check out my review
of The Hidden Face of Le Monde, first
published in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Ramsey File Everyone said the Ramseys killed
their own child -- everyone, minus one. In Salon, I
first made the case against rushing to judgement.